A few weeks ago my mom came to visit on the occasion of my step-daughter's high school graduation. I knew mom was about to arrive because, during the week leading up to her being here, my neck and shoulders began to stiffen up and become sore.
Her visits often have a certain rhythm to them. I feel tense as she arrives but she is upbeat and so it's all smiles and hugs. After a day or so she begins to be less upbeat and there is some kind of challenge to work out. After a few days there is often some kind of a larger challenge, especially if I try to draw any kind of a boundary with her. She hates to hear the word "No". After about three days I am ready for her to leave.
Mom lives alone. My family and I, almost without exception, are the only ones she has spent more than a few hours in close company with over the past twenty years. She can be bubbly and charming for very short spans but her mood fairly quickly wears thin.
During this visit I found myself drifting into what I'll call "Mom Fog". This is a common pattern of interaction between us; she talks and talks (and talks) and I start to fade out. She's talking about what she's thinking about and has very little interest in what others' views and thoughts might be.
This stimulates my childhood pattern: I had very little emotional room to grow as a person. The space for "me", where my sense of self could grow, was very, very small. The space I was given was her projection and had little or no relation to what I was or was not feeling at any given time. She had very low empathy toward my inner life so she would just project her own imagination of what she wanted my inner life to be. Her projection had almost no relation to my actual experience. My feelings were invisible to her and so, as this pattern laid in over time, they became invisible to me.
My survival mechanism was to support her at all costs. And so I hid myself. I never really took hold of my own agenda and, instead, identified with hers. Her narcissism blinded her to what was going on.
Mom Fog is the experience of losing my self in the ceaseless ramble of words and thoughts she is always sharing. I have worked to have a greater sense of self, but I need to be away from her in order to develop that. When I am around her I have a split intention: part of me pushes her away very strongly while another part tries to be friendly and accommodating.
This split creates the Mom Fog where I feel pulled into a dangerous, me-effacing vortex that swirls into oblivion. Oblivion, in this case, means living my life in order to serve her agenda--a place where I have no individual will but all of what I have to give is taken by her, without even saying thanks.
My experience of Mom Fog continues to relate to her narcissism. Often I feel like I don't really matter to her except in so far as I serve her agenda. She doesn't see who I am. She often doesn't say thank you when she's asked me to do something and I do it. Saying thank you is the most basic level of acknowledging the other person and his role; that he matters. The fact she often does not say thank you tells me she's still stuck in the same mindset that imprinted on me when I was a kid.
Mom Fog comes when I deny the feelings brought up in me when she starts doing "her thing". I stuff all of the pain. I stuff all of my anger. In me lies fury over all of this. But I smile and do my turn as the dutiful son, without saying anything. Why? Perhaps it is because I have to pick my battles. The period of my step-daughter's graduation was not the time to do major processing with my mom. We needed to keep our attention focused on what was important and not distract from this important event.
I acknowledge that my mom is not malicious, she's just clueless. She wants to do better but she doesn't know where to start. She's been stuck in these patterns for a very long time. Her bipolar mixes up with other medical issues to make her perceptions wobbly at times. I don't think it would be all that fruitful to "have it out" with her around my childhood, because her memory of those years is spotty. She has many times shared a "memory" with me which was actually distorted memory fragments from completely different times and contexts. My mom largely lives in the moment and that's pretty much where you have to meet her.
Additionally, my mom could not handle what I really think and feel. She has lived with her projection of me all these years. She would likely feel crushed by what my actual experience has been. She knows I am angry about things but I have shared very little of the content of my angry feelings. But I do have to acknowledge the feelings myself. My doing this is an absolute key to my healing. It's being divorced from my feelings, the legacy of Mom Fog, that is one of the major challenges I face in life.
Writing this down was really helpful for me. I wrote most of it while mom was here; the process of writing and acknowledging my experience was a major help to me. I was able to pull out of Mom Fog and be more present for my step-daughter's graduation.
Thank God for blogs!
Your comments are welcome.
Warmly, Ben
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